De Romanicorum Theoriarum VI

Thoughts on (or at least easily relatable to) speculative fiction.

• I am very curious to know why there are basically no aliens in science fiction who are half as alien to the modern Euro-American mindset as the average African or East Asian. If there were obvious conscious worldbuilding involved—the aliens had particular movements that paralleled the history of Western thought—I wouldn't mind it. But cultures in science fiction, whether they're a eugenicist military dictatorship, effete artisans of Byzantine complexity, an all-encompassing bureacracy, a rapacious merchant culture, a Proud Warrior Race—really any of the many space-versions of Nazis, Communists, or various caricatures of the Japanese—always have, except where it would directly interfere with their "hat", the mores of 21st century First World Anglophones from the Northern Hemisphere (okay, in Farscape they're from the Southern Hemisphere).
  
  I mean, hell, the closest even Farscape ever got to "don't take things from tombs, you'll get cursed" is a goofball, mummy's curse B-plot in one episode. But that's not how the belief works. You won't be cursed because curses were laid on graves to protect them. You'll be cursed because the dead don't like being stolen from, and their wrath ruins your luck. Again: Western assumption, that someone has to do something special before the supernatural happens. Plainly the Catholic priesthood is living rent-free inside your atheo-agnostico-Protty heads. Every other person on the planet thinks that that kind of stuff just happens, getting cursed is as natural as being pregnant because you had sex (yes, yes, the Tiwi—you're only proving my point, because the Tiwi not knowing where babies come from is freaking weird).
• Logically, "demihuman" should refer to things like half-elves and half-orcs. The "demi" is the "demi" from "demitasse", it means "half". And while "demihuman" was coined in obvious imitation of "demigod", "demigod" refers to the half-divine nature of the being in question. It's also not any kind of actual mythological term, it was coined in the 16th century by Renaissance writers. The Greeks called those people "heroes"; they didn't need the divine-nature issue spelled out for them, because almost all the heroes of myth had cultic status.
  
  The "almost" implication may, perhaps, be viewed as insulting. A lot of stupid manga translators render the Japanese equivalent of "demihuman", ajin, as "subhuman" (the "A", 亜, means "second, next, after"...also "Asia")—it's probably related to that "subspecies" thing—and "demigods" are less than full gods. So how about "perihumans"? "Peri-" just means "close to, around", no direction specified; the Japanese equivalent would be "kinjin" or "konjin", written 近人 (unfortunately that is also the Chinese for "neighbor", but given the Japanese for "daughter" means "mother" in Chinese, and "OK" means "man of honor", I don't think we're setting any dangerous precedents here).
• I realized, Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones is just an unusual lag-time on mid-90s Darker and Edgier. The first book came out the year before Spawn got a live action movie and the same year that Rob Liefeld was hired to "re-envision" a number of iconic Marvel heroes, the year after the first Sin City trade came out, and during Mark Millar's run on Swamp Thing.
  
  So plainly, the pay-cable miniseries was not the way to go—though admittedly pay-cable soft-porn was a big 90s thing. But to truly capture the spirit of Martin's opus (it's really more a Bill the Cat), it should be a graphic novel from Image Comics (or Liefeld's other label, Awesome Comics, no really), written by Millar and drawn by Liefeld. Todd MacFarlane could make the action figures.
• Saw the new Judge Dredd movie. It is much more like the comics, but that is not a point in its favor. Except everything and everyone in the comics was 80s-90s Comic Book Punk, a design movement also seen in Lobo, Dark Knight Returns, and Tank Girl. The movie? Only the Judges are not simply wearing our clothes, using our appliances, and driving our cars. And given even the Judges just wear the helmet, gun, and badge from the comics over off-the-rack biker safety-gear, it seems like the production designer (I checked, they actually did have one, Mark Digby) should've had a lot of free time to design future stuff. They also pretty much just took Phoenix or LA and Photoshopped a few slightly bigger buildings here and there. Uh...this, you should really have just blindly copied the comics on. Because Mega-City One is a claustrophobic urban hell where the ground is more or less invisible from where most of the action happens—your version is less claustrophobic than modern New York. The Stallone version actually did it pretty good. Or Coruscant in Star Wars.
  
  Also, the only reason to make a movie that graphically violent is if you think it's going to impress the eighth graders, maybe get them to let you sit with them at the big-kid table. And if you must have extremely detailed shots of people being blown apart, it might behoove you to study the differences between humans and nematodes. I refer to the fact that people have bones—even if you reduce someone to the consistency of peanut butter, it's going to be crunchy-style. (Also, Slo-Mo was basically Red Eye (or Bloody Eye), from the very first episode of Cowboy Bebop, and, given its particular neurologial effects, it should not be primarily a recreational drug but a performance-enhancing one, and thus could've made for a much better final confrontation.)
• I wonder if I should actually have a paragraph explaining that the translators in my books combine rules-based with statistical corpus-analysis? We can't do that yet—checking our rules against a corpus or our statistical against rules—because of hardware constraints, but 24th century technology is just a bit more capable.
  
  Google Translate uses a statistical algorithm rather than rules-based, and while rules-based breaks down with long sentences, Google Translate generally can't even do a single, one-clause Chinese or Japanese sentence without spitting out gibberish. Half the time when it does Chinese, it would've done better with a literal word-for-word translation—many English-based creoles (Jamaican Patois, for instance) work almost exactly like literally-translated Chinese, and most English speakers have only occasional difficulties understanding those when they're not spelled phonetically.
  
  When your translator's algorithm yields a worse result than literal word-for-word, your algorithm is broken. Sorry.
• I was thinking about the fact that ideas are not bound by the limits of material commodities. Analyzed in those terms, the "marketplace of ideas" (to use a phrase that should be banned) is roughly a post-scarcity economy. And that made me realize why post-scarcity economies don't and can't actually exist, and why so many of the people who think they could also fall for the Glazier's Fallacy. The issue is opportunity costs. Even ideas have those, in a way: if you think one thing is true, you can no longer think that of its contradictions. If you fix broken windows, that's time you can't use making new windows.
  
  Of course, most of the idiots who prattle about post-scarcity economies also think immortality is achievable through technology. The less stupid of them think it will be by mind-uploading, and I've talked about the problems with that. The more stupid think it can be achieved by medicine, only for some reason they always imagine it as a one-time deal, rather than perpetually needing to re-apply (probably quite invasive) anti-aging treatments. Think vampires, not Olympian gods—"You'll never grow old, Michael, and you'll never die. But you must feed ." Just like how, though cars and planes have essentially ended food-scarcity (except in places with Communist or nonexistent governments), once-worthless petroleum is now the foundation of entire national economies. Every elimination of scarcity brings a new scarcity, connected to the means by which the old one was eliminated.
• I have elsewhere talked about "alpha males", which properly means "married men with children", but I haven't mentioned "beta males". You know what's funny about it? In 9/10 of your interactions, the most dominant person is the beta, and cannot aspire to anything higher. A beta, in a wolf-pack (where the idea comes from) is the eldest or otherwise most dominant child (beta males are eldest sons, beta females eldest daughters). It's usually an adult from a previous litter of the alpha pair. It tends to its younger siblings, and gets to eat before they do.
  
  Now, as I've said, "society" is just a peace-treaty between families not to kill each other over territory. This peace is maintained by treating unrelated conspecifics, who are not being sought as mates, as kin. And since in the vast majority of such interactions, nobody stands to you as a father or a child, the only relationship is siblings (again, "spirit of brotherhood" is entirely accurate). The beta is the most dominant sibling, so properly, a person who dominates socially without becoming a father figure should not be called an alpha (fe)male, but a beta.
  
  Interestingly, the Chinese word for "Mister", that gives us "sensei" in Japanese, literally means "eldest brother".
• On the subject of "put some damn work into your xenobiology", have you seen the more recent reconstructions of pterosaurs? The main length of their forelegs (which were only wings when they took off, which they apparently did by jumping) was their metacarpals! Seriously, they have a fairly short upper arm, then a short forearm, and then the bones of their hands make up at least the same length as the previous two joints combined.
  
  This, of course, looks freakish, like their forelimbs are backwards dog-legs with the toes on backwards. The load-bearing part of their foreleg was just the first three fingers (the fourth being the one that supports the wing), and they had a weird little bone that might be a modified hand- or wrist-bone or might be something pterosaurs evolved all on their own, probably with help from shoggoths. The weird thing is, while their wrists were so freaky long? Their hind feet were plantigrade. Lovecraftian giraffe-crocodile in the front, black bear in the back, like some twisted walking mullet.
  
  The reason this is important, of course, is we never thought an animal would use its metacarpals the way dogs use their metatarsals. Think of possible modifications to the basic "four limbs, head full of sensory-organs" that's very likely for alien life, at least when designing alien animals if not for designing aliens themselves.
• But hey, what about, say, trilateral or pentilateral or n-lateral symmetries, for aliens? I confess to being doubtful. A very few animals, almost none of them with anything you'd really call a brain, and some plants, have that kind of rotational symmetry.
  
  Pretty much nothing but cnidarians, things we used to think were the same as cnidarians, and echinoderms has rotational symmetry, and the echinoderms have bilateral as larvae. I think it might have to do with gravity; "up" and "down" are the same for every animal on the planet, and most echinoderms, cnidarians, and ctenophores, like plants, largely orient toward up and down motion (think how jellyfish or sea cucumbers move). Other animals move forward and back, instead, but still inside a gravity well, so four of their dimensions are determined for them, hence bilateral symmetry. Maybe it's a rule that organisms are symmetrical only across an axis that isn't determined for them by motion (gravity is motion)?
  
  And I think if a creature is not going to be a flying mushroom (seriously, think about what jellyfish actually do—and sea anemones aren't even moving mushrooms), it's unlikely to orient toward vertical motion (the orientation of vegetation), and thus unlikely to develop radial symmetry. And if it does have a lifestyle where being shaped like a mushroom is helpful, why's it develop brains?